February Update

In October of 1975 the aging and ailing leader of Spain fell into a coma.  The nation prepared for the transition of power upon his death.  The funeral was planned.  The participants for the ceremonies were all ready.  The media was there to cover all of the events as they unfolded.  There was only one problem.  The old fart wouldn't die.  For three weeks Francisco Franco lingered somewhere between this world and the next as millions of people waited for news of his death and were repeatedly disappointed.  The evening news would include the same report every night that Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain was still clinging to life.  Finally he was removed from life support and the announcement came that Franco was dead.  You could almost hear a collective exclamation of "FINALLY!!!" from millions of people who were tired of waiting.  Following his death Chevy Chase did a running joke on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is STILL DEAD! 

In a similar manner I'm here to announce that the RV scam is still clinging to life.  January 2014 has come and gone with no RV, no GCR, no float, no full membership in the WTO, no internationally traded dinar .... etc.  And yet the hype continues.  Hopefully soon somebody will pull the plug on this thing and millions of people can get on with their lives.

Gurus were pumping away in January proclaiming that the RV will be revealed in the new budget, and that the issuance of bonds will bring us our blessing.  All nonsense of course, but it seems to work.

On the other hand, Marcus Curtis from Iraq Currency Watch has re-emerged with his insights from years of research as both an investor and a former investor.  His post "That's a Fact Jack - 40 Facts" shook a few people up by debunking many commonly held beliefs of dinar investors.  This came on the heels of a few other excellent posts on his blog.  Stryker went semi-postal in his "rebuttal", calling Marcus "Bozo".  Marcus has now issued a clarification to his post.  Good to see Marcus back in action.

Over the past few months a site called Baghdad Invest has also joined in the fun, sharing some of my thoughts and exposing a bit of douchebaggery themselves.  On Dec. 31 they did a post revealing that "Breitling" was trying to pull a fast one on his followers by sending them to this great dinar news blog owned by some guys he knows, when in fact his Google advertising ID comes up in the source code.  (Coincidentally he started pumping the site shortly after I wrote about the success of the rumour sites Dinar Guru and Dinar Recaps.)  The bottom line is Breitling is getting ad revenues produced by the traffic he generates by sending his followers to that site.  This is essentially the same thing he did with the ISX Report produced by some guys he knows but for some strange reason Breitling's company's name came up on the PayPal page when you ordered the report.  Breitling is pretty easy to see through.  He's claiming to be an investment expert so that he can make money off of the people who don't know any better than to listen to him.  Unfortunately a few of us are watching him and making that more difficult with each new scheme.  Like the LDHL penny stock he pumped, which some poor shmuck apparently bought at $1.50 before it tanked back to below $1 and is now in a trading range between 40 and 50 cents.  (LDHL, LDHL II)  Then there was REIC, a real estate MLM scheme he promoted whose founder was reportedly fined $75,000 for defrauding investors.  And both of these followed years of hyping the RV of the dinar (whose value has remained remarkably stable for five years now) and the Vietnamese dong (which has steadily lost value).  Great track record, huh?

http://www.baghdadinvest.com/is-breitling-report-telling-the-whole-truth/



Also at Baghdad Invest a guy named Zahlid shook some folks up when he mentioned that the redenomination would take place prior to the election in late April, and that there will be no exchanges outside of Iraq.  This is the worst case scenario for dinar investors, and I have discussed the possibility several times in this blog.  While it's impossible to say at this point whether or not Zahlid is the real deal, the risk of illiquidity has been there along along.  John Jagerson discussed this in his videos from 2009.  Several of my readers have also shared their views on how this will play out.  While many dinar investors have stated that Iraq could never get away with screwing over investors like that, the fact of the matter is Iraq has stated all along that the dinar was for use IN COUNTRY, and they have been up front about their intentions to replace the IQD with a new currency.  If this scenario occurs, the screwing over will have been done by the scammers, not the Iraqis.

http://www.baghdadinvest.com/iraqi-dinar-revaluation-strong-thoughts-jack/


And back in Iraq, the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah were reportedly taken over by Al Queda.  The death toll for January topped 900 as the wave of violence continues.  But not to worry, everything's just hunky dory for our "investment".  Just keep listening to updates from TNT Tony so you'll know when it's your turn to cash in.  (That was sarcasm, by the way.)


And finally, our own Brian Simpson (well, we don't own him but I consider him family) did an incredible post on the GCR (Global Currency Reset) scam at Baghdad Invest.  You won't find this at Dinar Recaps, but with his permission I'd like to include it here.


..... the GCR as it is being pumped is total nonsense. Even most “GCR” proponents can’t explain what they’re trying to pump beyond throwing round a few buzzwords like “fiat” and “fractional reserve banking” (and then laughably attributing them only to the USA). There’s about a dozen different variants depending on which conspiracy forums you read. They mumble something along the lines of “Some will rise, some will fall, it will be based around resources, look beyond the fiat!” then go very quiet when you ask them to put up actual facts (and not just feel-good soundbites or “shared hope”) and spell out the exact mechanism on which currencies are supposed to be “reset” by, what “resources” and what “pegged rates”, which centrally planned global organism will determine these “rates” instead of the market, how they’re going to cope with countries lying about ‘discovered’ resources, why on earth would you count “all oil reserves” when most extracted oil gets either internally consumed or exported for someone else’s consumption, who’s going to accept 50/60/75/100 year IOU’s from the bank for the oil & minerals that wont be extracted / mined until 2065/2075/2090/2114AD and are actually in a usable form that people can actually exchange with the currency it’s supposed to be backing (otherwise it’s nothing more than another paper commodities futures contract), etc.

Years ago someone proposed a “one world currency reset” by redenominating all currencies to the same value (as happened with the Euro countries with the introduction of the Euro). Of course, it didn’t take long before the “RV” guru’s & pumpers (and tin-foil-hat brigade) jumped on it and rewrote it as some “mega global RV” which has done nothing but confuse a lot of people. In reality, all there is, is some rather desperate people trying to convince themselves that “If Iraq won’t RV itself then everyone on the planet will be RV’d, yes that’s it, that must be the ‘explanation’ for my ‘windfall’!”. LOL. It’s total gibberish because the Iraqi Dinar simply isn’t undervalued even with all Iraq’s “resources”, and Iraq’s annual $100bn oil exports wouldn’t even back 0.11% of a $85,000bn “$1 rate RV/GCR”! The problem is not what “backs” it ($ vs oil vs gold) it’s that there are 85,000bn IQD in circulation vs only 31bn KWD – the one thing RV / GCR guru’s repeatedly run away from as it instantly debunks the entire “the Dinar is undervalued and is just waiting for…” false premise.

Iraq only has $1.2bn worth of gold. If you tried to “back 85tn Dinar” solely with that, you’d end up with an equivalent $ rate of 70833:1 (60x LESS)! Even if it “doubled overnight” Jim-Willie-style it would still only be worth $3bn (and Iraq would still have 85,000bn paper money).

Basing a currency’s value on vague unspecified “resources” simply laying in the ground as Jan claims, is total nonsense. As for “backing the Dinar with oil”, Iraq may have 140bn barrels of oil (which at $100 oil price = $14tn assets) – BUT that $14tn worth of oil is going to be spread over the next 127 years in the form of 3.0m barrels per day actual production. If Iraq increases exports to 4m barrels, that $14tn of oil will still be spread over the next 96 years. Some highly deluded people genuinely think all that 140bn barrels will all be magically teleported out of the ground in 2014 and donated to the CBI, and stuck in some giant warehouse for “backing the Dinar” tomorrow without a single drop being sold or used ever again…

No country is going to “squeeze in” every single year’s economies from 2014-2141AD’s all into 2014 currency’s valuation (the absurd GCR in a nutshell). You could make the same argument with the USA and claim the US Dollar “is going to skyrocket” if you “count” 127 year’s worth of future US exports which = $194tn or 13.8x Iraq’s worth of oil reserves. LOL. Iraq has 85tn Dinar and 140bn barrels of oil or basically, enough to “back” 607 Dinar with 1 barrel worth $100. Except they don’t because Iraq will consume around 1/5 to 1/4 of it themselves and export virtually all of the rest to non-Iraqi’s – in both cases all that oil is no longer available to “back” the Dinar!

Same with minerals, if you have 1m tons of aluminum “resources”, you dig it up and use 300k tons to build stuff and you sell 700k to other countries, how much do you have left as “currency backing” just sitting there in a pile doing nothing? None. People dig up oil & metals to use or export, and once it gets used or exported it’s not available for “backing” anything. This is why simply quoting a nation’s “reserves” and assigning an arbitrary “GCR exchange rate” to the currency based on that is absurd.

It’s also comically inconsistent. Apparently “Canada’s going to fall and Iraq’s going to rise due to Iraq’s oil”. Which is hilarious given that Canada (175bn barrels) has 25% more oil than Iraq (140bn barrels) and a whole lot more other natural resources. China will also LOSE out due to being a net IMPORTER of virtually every raw resource going from oil & LNG to iron, copper & aluminum, titanium, uranium, etc, to coal, timber, rubber, etc. Why do people think they’re running around Africa & South America buttering up the locals? Because they don’t have enough resources to sustain even what they consume (let alone surplus leftover to “back” 110tn Yuan at some wonder high rate)! Yet more proof that the people shovelling this GCR conspiracy haven’t even bothered to research any of the countries they’re pumping.

And using non-recyclable resources (like oil) as a “currency backing” as an inflation hedge is also totally backwards & contradictory. As each year goes by, oil gets burnt up or sold to someone else to burn up and is no longer available. Iraq can’t keep it in a vault for all eternity, they have to constantly sell it (to fund central govt in place of taxes) / or burn it internally (transportation, oil power stations, construction, etc) out of necessity. Every time Iraq burns or exports a barrel of oil that oil will no longer be inside Iraq “backing the Dinar” – making whatever “GCR resource peg” more and more OVER-valued as each year goes by.

If Iraq has 140bn barrels of oil and sells oil at 1.1bn barrels per year (and consumes more internally on top), then as each year goes by, its “resources” backing its currency increasingly dwindle and they’ll need to LOWER the value of their currency peg vs oil with an endless stream of annual DOWNWARD RV’s because if they lose currency-backing-resources each year, then their resource-backed-currency will lose value each year too! And all the while their population is growing they still have to print more money for liquidity purposes, amplifying the effect. What “Genius” came up with that? Avoiding “inflation” by using a constantly dwindling resource that’s naturally permanently inflationary? LOL. If you want a hedge against inflation, you don’t peg your currency to an asset which shrinks each year (oil) as that’s exactly the same long-term effect as “printing too much fiat money and not having the resources t back it”

There’s just as many “GCR guru’s” spewing out junk economics as there are “RV” guru’s. Many people cling to this because they’re deathly afraid of admitting Iraq is going to redenominate and are left trying to find some alternative “magic millionaire elixir” to “allow” Iraq to keep 85tn Dinar and “somehow” magically make it “more valuable” to avoid admitting the blatantly obvious “elephant in the room” - the Iraqi Dinar is 3,000x weaker than the Kuwaiti Dinar simply because Iraq have printed 3,000x more paper money than Kuwait… A vastly disproportionate people hanging round GCR conspiracy stuff are either “Doomsday gold bugs” predicting “imminent $5,000 gold prices” every month since 1999 or are Dinar holders who’ve realized the absurdity of a “100,000% RV” for Iraq, yet strangely see nothing wrong in extending the same contorted logic to the whole planet to try and keep “the dream” going…